Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (April 2020). This substantial new single-author book applies textual computing to the science-fiction-philosophy novel Cloud Atlas, and is also free and under full Creative Commons.

This book is the first full-length monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear in a sustained fashion, on a single novel, at the micro-level. While most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history – using their digital methods as a telescope – following calls by Alan Liu and Tanya E. Clement, Close Reading with Computers instead asks what happens when such techniques function as a microscope.

As such it is possibly of interest as an exemplar for a set of computational techniques and approaches that could be used on a Lovecraft work. With the dense and historical (and public domain) Dexter Ward springing to mind.

New from Emily Alder of Edinburgh Napier University, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle. The focus is on British authors and their relations with science as then understood. Alder appears to be challenging the assumption that such works were all in some way ‘supernatural’ or were an elaboration of ‘the gothic’.

In this book, I conceive weird fiction as a literature of borderland science. In its fin-de-siecle forms, the weird tale arises because scientific discourses had murky edges, because the limits of knowledge and the extent of what was or wasn’t possible in the world were unclear, because the boundaries of valid scientific enquiry itself were not stable. Weird fictions flourish in gaps in knowledge or beyond its edges. … Some tales exploit the gaps and possibilities in materialist science opened up by late nineteenth-century biology and evolutionary theories; some extrapolate from theories of physics, from classic thermodynamics and the new physics of unseen, subatomic worlds. All pick up on the strangeness of science, of what is already weird. … Weird fiction and science belong to the same, widespread cultural conversation taking place at this time about new knowledge… [its authors react] to changing ways of understanding generated by scientific exploration, considering how their implications might be experienced by individuals in the present, projected into the future, and reconciled with competing worldviews.

It looks like an interesting approach. Here are the contents…

CONTENTS:

* Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siecle.

* Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology, and States of Mind in Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen.

* Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit.

* Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson. [On the ‘occult detectives’ sub-genre].

* Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter.

* Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells.

* Weird Energies: Physics, Futures, and the Secrets of the Universe in Hodgson and Blackwood.

There’s a second edition of Bookery’s Guide to Pulps & Related Magazines, new in 2020 from Ivy Press. It’s a comprehensive price guide in the Overstreet tradition, but could also be a handy lookup for years and titles for historians. The 400-page 2005 edition is on Archive.org, if you want to see the sort of thing you’ll be getting for your $30 for the new edition.

For those who buy a copy, I’d suggest you might get an interesting blog post by tabulating a few prices, comparing 2005 → 2020 and looking for trends both up and down.

A new book, due later in 2020…

My new book: Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson is due to be published on October 30th of this year”

The core idea seems to be that some of us enjoy imagining extreme aliens/robots, encountered under extreme conditions. Such ideas then both threaten and reinforce the reader’s ideas about ‘what it is to be human’. One can certainly see how such repeated literary lessons might have been useful for a certain kind of young nerd in the 1930s-80s.